I can still remember that I was not very successful in my last KAP attempts at the blast furnace plant on Phoenix-West. Because there was too little wind, the kite did not reach the desired height and I only had pictures that did not show the plant completely.
That should be different today. And indeed, the flare made it to the desired height. The wind was sufficient, but also very gusty. I decided not to use a videodownload, because in this gusty and uneven wind the camera constantly shows a different image section anyway.
To the west of the town of Hörde, construction of the first blast furnace plant began after the founding of the Hörder Verein in 1852 (the part of the plant later called Phoenix-West). The Hörder Verein was thus one of the first iron and steel companies in the Ruhr region to realise not only steel production and further processing but also the upstream production stages of pig iron production. The first blast furnace was blown in 1854. Three more soon followed, so that by 1855/1856 the blast furnace plant was producing 22,750 tonnes of pig iron a year with around 1200 workers – a total of around 2100 workers were employed by the Hörder Verein. By 1870 the amount of pig iron had risen to 58,000 tonnes a year. Some of the ore was mined in the company’s own ironstone pit.
At the Phoenix-West site in the south of Dortmund, a few plants still remain as monuments. These are the two almost 100-metre-high blast furnaces with some buildings and installations, such as the hot blast stoves or the water tower. In 2002, large parts of the blast furnace plant were listed under monument protection. The first blast furnace tapping took place at Phoenix-West in 1854 and the last in 1998.
